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17%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #5,834
...out of 20,698 movies
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A race of alien robots have conquered Earth and forced humanity underground. After 400 years, a small group of humans develop a plan to defeat the mechanical invaders in the ultimate battle between man and machine.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: July 21, 2007
Hollywood loves to churn out the big summer blockbusters, and The Asylum sure loves to rip them off. Let's take a quick peek at their track record, shall we? Let's see... first, Spielberg decided to give us his take on War of the Worlds, so Asylum decided to give us another film entitled - wait for it - War of the Worlds. Then there was that wretched When a Stranger Calls remake, so Asylum upped the ante with When a Killer Calls. The Hitcher - The Hitchhiker. The Da Vinci Code - The Da Vinci Treasure. Snakes on a Plane - Snakes on a Train. I don't think that I need to spell out which recent release this one is cashing in on, but to be fair, the director has claimed that it was an original idea that Asylum retitled in order to be more appealing to the Blockbuster-going public. I'll let viewers be the judge of that, but the similarities are uncanny.
In the year 2009, man found life on another planet and sent out a message inviting peace and communication between us and them. Five years later, they responded by sending giant robots equipped with all sorts of high-tech weaponry that wiped out ninety percent of the earth's population. The survivors retreated to a large underground bunker, where life has gone on as best as possible for the last couple hundred years (I think - the time line seems to go back and forth as the story progresses). Now, in the "present" day, these shapeshifting robots are closing in on the bunker and threatening to wipe out the human race entirely, but the soldiers inside won't go down without a fight. Two squads are setup with some of the best soldiers and weapons available, and the future of our planet all boils down to one epic showdown between man and machine.
Now, I should probably get this out of the way right from the start: yes, this is a low budget movie, and as such, the effects used here aren't going to rival Michael Bay's latest in any way, shape or form. However, what surprised me about the film was the fact that a large chunk of the effects actually looked damned good; sure, there are a few scenes in which the budget issues show and there are a couple that look downright horrible, but there's a lot of scenes which were quite impressive given the budget. Watch as one of the robots transforms - excuse me, transmorphs - into a huge gun-type machine and tell me that it doesn't put a smile on your face.
The acting is... well, this is a mindless action flick, so to expect high-quality acting from it regardless of the budget is laughable. Although I haven't seen it yet, I doubt that any of the actors appearing in Transformers are going to be nominated for any best actor or actress awards, so to expect the same from this is just silly. Yes, some of the people appearing here seem a little out of place in front of the camera and yes, some of the line delivery should have came with splinter warnings, but that's not what you pick a movie like this up for: you pick it up to see gigantic robots tearing shit up, and you get enough of that to make this a decent rental.
The only real strike against the film is the storyline tying everything together. Now, this is another aspect of mindless action flicks that you shouldn't expect too much from, but there were times when I simply didn't know what was going on due to the scenes changing back and forth so many times and the characters shifting from one setting to the next with little to no lead-in. There's a lot of things that budget can be blamed for, but bad editing is not one of them and I think a little work in this regard would have done wondrous things for the film as a whole.
One final thing that I should probably mention here is the audio. Prior to receiving the film, I had heard all sorts of claims that the audio was out of sync with the video, things happen on screen (ie, gunshots and explosions) with no sound attached to them, and large chunks of the speech couldn't be made out due to the sound effects and / or the score overshadowing the dialogue. I read these claims from a number of reliable reviewers, so I'm going to guess that it wasn't an isolated incident, but I have to say that I didn't experience either of the first two problems with my disc. Maybe the disc has been reissued, maybe they got bad screeners, or maybe I was just lucky, but the fact remains that I had no problems with the audio save for (to a very small extent) the thing about sound overshadowing the speech: I noticed that in two or three scenes, but it was nothing to really complain about.
Overall though, I did enjoy it for what it was, and that was particularly surprising since I'm not exactly a huge fan of the Transformers franchise. Whether that worked for or against the film, I'm not entirely sure - but I do think that fans of the source material will enjoy this so long as they don't expect effects that rival Hollywood's. 6/10.
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#1:
Danington138
- added July 29, 2007 at 7:02pm
AHAHAHAHAHA!!! WTF!!!?? transMORPHERS ARE YOU
FUCKING SERIOUS!!!??
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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#2:
Crispy
- added June 19, 2008 at 9:42pm
I had all the sound problems you were talking
about, plus some scenes where the characters were
firing their guns, you'd hear the
"peeew" but no laser would be fired.
Annoyed me to no end. Can't say I really enjoyed
this movie.
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